About

‘It is cliché perhaps, but what I enjoy the most is definitively being so close to the business,’ Peter De Neef says on his role at GDF Suez. ‘I deliberately chose to go in-house in a company in a line of business that personally interested me.’ Though he is still at an early stage of his in-house career, De Neef has already made a meaningful impression on those around him. ‘Peter has been at the forefront of developing projects in the most challenging jurisdictions,’ says one private practice source of De Neef, who spent three years in the Middle East, prior to joining GDF Suez’s South East Asian arm in 2011. His achievements to date include playing a central role in structuring Mongolia’s CHP5 project, one of GDF’s major investments in the region. De Neef himself says he is particularly proud of successfully closing an IPP (power plant) project in Abu Dhabi. ‘I was completely new to the business,’ he recalls. ‘The closing was supposed to be pretty straightforward. However, right then, the 2008 financial crisis hit, leading to months of very difficult negotiations with contractors in Germany and Korea, the government of Abu Dhabi, Japanese partners and banks’. The entire experience – and the fact the plant itself is today fully operational – was, for De Neef, a defining moment in his early career. ‘For me, this project in Abu Dhabi really meant: learn to swim, or drown – but I learned so much and the feeling of achievement was huge’. As well as completing the task at hand, De Neef has proved particularly popular with the outside counsel he instructs. ‘Peter is a strong team player,’ opines Anna Collyer at Allens. ‘He has great technical skill and focus on detail, while still maintaining a clear commercial perspective and appreciating the nuances of doing business in emerging economies’. The need to adapt and work well with others is something De Neef himself is very aware of. ‘I typically get along quite well with the business teams and other departments,’ he says, though he concedes certain past experiences have impressed upon him the need to be ‘flexible’ and to understand different people’s approaches. Amongst the changes De Neef has made to the legal team in his current role, he feels his introduction of a centralised document management system across Dubai, Bangkok and Jakarta has been particularly significant. ‘This is in line with my strong belief in knowledge sharing,’ explains De Neef, who participates in various knowledge-sharing groups and initiatives worldwide.